E-mail is one of the most widely used services on the internet, and a user can communicate with another network user at any corner of the world at a very low price through an E-mail system on the network. An E-mail can be in various forms, such as text, image, sound and the like. Each E-mail user has an E-mail address which is typically in the format of abc@xyz, in which what are before @ represent the character combination or code of an individual user, and what are after @ represent a name of a server providing E-mail service to the user, for example, user@hotmail.com. The main basic protocols involved include Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3), etc. IM is another service provided through the internet, that is to say, information received from a sender is forwarded to a receiver without storage and messages can be exchanged between a receiving terminal and a sending terminal directly. The involved protocols include Extensible Message and Presence Protocol (XMPP), SIP Instant Message and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP) and the like. Currently, one of the directions of development is implementing the IM using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based protocol.
E-mail and IM are the main two types of message services on the internet. Users are using both Internet communication tools such as E-mails and Ns, etc. and telecommunication network communications such as short messages and multimedia messages, etc. Currently, the converged messaging service is proposed in the industry, so that a user can exchange messages with anyone using different technologies, media and user terminals anytime and anywhere. To implement the converged messaging service, one way is to provide a converged messaging service system, which provides service users with complete, consistent and convenient messaging service experience. Service users can intercommunicate with each other by IM technique based converged message, and can also intercommunicate with users of the above mentioned various traditional messaging service rather than the converged messaging service. One of the important aspects of interworking is the interworking between converged message and E-mail. As the converged message is based on the IM technique, the converged message and E-mail interworking can be implemented on the basis of the implementation of IM and E-mail interworking.
Existing techniques for addressing IM and E-mail interworking are just directed to how to transfer messages sent from a service user on one side to a service receiver on the other side without taking the implementation of directly making a message reply to the original message sender by the receiver into account.